Partially ruptured achilles tendon

Anyone any experience of this? The vet is going to splint it and see if it improves on its own. She says she's never seen this is a cat and isn't in favour of surgery as the skin is very tight and she thinks it would be hard to get sutures to stay in.

I've looked online and apparently surgery is generally seen as the preferred option, though horribly expensive (way more than we could reasonably afford, in all honesty) and that the alternative would be amputation.